When he was appointed minister, this essayist announced Nyesom Wike a third-term governor. But few knew he would carry the halo of his state of provenance to his governance of Abuja. The man enters Abuja with expectations. A town where he never passed a night in eight years as governor will now give him a bed and a pillow.
As Mister bulldozer of FCT, some feared his first stop was Atiku’s house. No dice. Others said, First stop PDP secretariat. When last week he became earthquake Wike, neither Atiku nor PDP was looking over the rubble of their palaces. They are probably the coward in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart who is looking at the ruins of the brave man’s house from the comfort of his window.
But those whose lands went bust had exercised the fortitude of folly. The FCT minister gave them time to update their documents. He advertised them in the newspapers, including this one. They did not heed. Wike was not a man to bait. He acted and, like dominos, big names and small fell. The roll call was breathtaking. One of the big names was Peter Obi, the mister clean who has kept mute at the time of writing this essay on why he did not comply with the law. Others fell, too, including former governor Imoke, former Supreme Court Justice Niki Tobi. A corporate Bulldozer crumbled to the official bulldozer. That is, Julius Berger. This should not surprise anyone that Wike, in the early going, is the minister on the front perch. Politicians, moguls, celebrities, puny souls were lapped up.
As governor, Wike was a man of shifting parts, often like a jigsaw puzzle. Even though a governor, you probably saw an entertainer. When an entertainer, he could become a philosopher. When he philosophised, he could come across as a fighter. When a fighter, at times you thought him a man of peace. Even as a man of peace, a pugilist is in the offing, like a tiger about to roar. As we witnessed often, he strutted on project sites, under his hat and behind his dark goggles. He could become Al Capone but we knew he was not. He was just Governor Wike. Defiant, beloved, working.
When he entertained, we were amused. When he philosophised, we mused. When he governed or came with projects, his fans emoted. When he fought, others felt like taking off their gloves with him or against him. When he mounted a peace offensive, some took offence while many were happy for a hug. As Mister Project, he lay brick after brick. He slammed asphalt on highways. For every cement he plastered, It appeared he was burying his foes beneath.
He was a governor who some first saw as quicksand but later understood that he was marching his state on a firm footing. He marched, his people behind and beside him as he mounted projects, fought political wars, galvanized a people, united them and sometimes made his state, Rivers, the centre of the universe. He brought on the political platform a peculiar view of the social contract.
This was his dimension of what philosophers like Locke and Rousseau crafted as social contract. Wike’s social contract did not come only in the soaring terms of a formal agreement between the governed and governor.
He had his election. He was voted and sworn in. He gave an inaugural speech. He took on the epaulettes of office. He had guards, motorcade, powers. But that was a technical social contract. Everyone in power must have it. It gave his mandate the starchy air of the letter of the law. But the sort that Wike projected is a rare form of contract between the governed and governor. It is the contract of the impulse, the contract of the heart. In one word, the bond of the psyche.
That was in evidence when he was launching a project and he burst into a rhetoric: As e dey pain dem, e dey sweet us. He burst into a song. He became the first governor to be a song writer. He had no filter of a producer or contract. Out of a spontaneous blaze of poesy and lyricism, he entertained not only those who attended the event. He had encased in the hearts of a nation an album of politics. Children sang it. Parents launched it as missiles at their neighbours. It became a chorus in lovers’ spats. They invoked it in local quarrels, in evocations at church, in the fights of the Holy Spirit against the devil. But from a song that was meant to remind us of the G-5 or Integrity Group, Wike had turned an intra-party feud into a cause celebre, a grudge match into an hour of artistic genius.
We saw that in his desire to satisfy every aspect of Rivers State in his work of the heart. He built schools, courts, hospitals, stadiums. He understood as an Ikwerre man the need to traverse the ethnic groups, moving to Ogoniland, Kalabariland, Andoni, et al, embracing each land, and reminding them that he was not a governor as bigot. He had a kaleidoscope of interests.
As if to stress that, he also popularised the phrase, Inye ne ba, inye ne ba, which showed that the world must be lived in mutual understanding.
But it was all for Rivers State, even when he made forays on the national stage. He ran for president, and it seemed he was on the cusp of winning his party, the People’s Democratic Party’s, nomination, when a gang-up derailed a fait accompli.
He started a war that many saw as patriotic. Why would the party not play fair, why would it not be faithful to an agreement? In a nation wracked by sectarian and regional suspicions, why would his party impose a sectional idea. Why would the PDP make Abubakar Atiku, a northerner, its flag bearer after all the southern governors had agreed that it must go south. Again, the party said it would not remove Iyorchia Ayu as party chairman, presenting both party candidate and chair from a section of the country.
It was the principle of fairness that thrust him on the front burner of national politics, launching the Integrity Group, and its missiles as a party that did not know how to make peace.
It was here that Wike, in all his eight years, showed his mettle as a man, guile as a politician and strategy as a leader. The party had sleepless nights, saying he only had one vote. He was disposable. He was not a factor. He was a sour grape. He was in his last career lap in politics.
That was how he was able to make a bond with the nation the way he made a bond with his people in Rivers. He did not do it as a gentleman. He did not do it as a compromiser. He lifted principle over a flimsy pact. He did not succumb like a victim to a rapist.
In the end, he won. He won for principle. He won at home, sweeping the state for his PDP, while letting the world know that PDP in the centre broke because they broke the basic law of organization: faith in the rules. He gloated over PDP loss in the centre, while the local chapter swept the governorship, senate, House of representatives and the state house of assembly.
Some gripe that he is a PDP man in APC government. APC says he is welcome. He sits in an extraordinary position of being a PDP man from a honeypot state with an APC sympathy. If some people are losing their lands, others are losing their party because of this man. The former loss may not equal the latter. Whatever the case, Earthquake Wike rumbles so some may grumble.
NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected Columnist with The Nation
